Steve Jobs (pre-turtleneck, plus cowboy boots)

From Modern Mechanix by way of Jalopnik, here’s a 1982 National Geographic story on the state of affairs in Silicon Valley at that moment in history.  I’m a total nerd-history nerd, so this was a great read for me.  Granted, I was ten years old in 1982, but I was a pretty hardcore BASIC programmer and video game aficionado, and I would have read any and all computer-related press at the time.  Almost thirty years later it’s worth checking out for the pictures alone, especially the beard/perm/Perrier/hot tub shot.

The descriptions of Silicon Valley culture in 1982 are strongly reminiscent of Tracy Kidder’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine.  Especially this statement from Intel exec Bob Noyce:

With a certain wistfulness for the days of the individual breakthrough, he says, “Now it’s a team effort. In 1970 Federico Faggin designed the 4004 microprocessor chip by himself at Intel in nine months; our 32-bit microprocessor took 100 man-years!”  [emphasis mine]

I was surprised by the experience of reading the article, itself.  It’s been scanned, a page at a time, and posted in its correct order, but the original design was based around two opposing pages being visible to the reader at the same time.  Seeing only one page at any given moment makes it slightly difficult to follow the text accompanying the images, since it frequently refers to an image on the opposite page, making images first appear out of context, then explaining them when they’re no longer visible.  Most contemporary magazines are designed so that virtually every page is completely self-contained — all of the necessary context for the images appears on the same page.

This is a great example of how the very experience of reading has changed dramatically since internet-compatible publishing became the standard.